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Order and otherness in a photographic shot: Italians abroad and the Great War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2017

Giorgia Alù
Giorgia Alù*
Affiliation:
Department of Italian Studies, University of Sydney, Australia
*
*Email: giorgia.alu@sydney.edu.au
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Abstract

This article explores the meaning of photographic portraits of First World War Italian migrants, in terms of the tensions that emerge from their visual codes and the extent to which the subject’s interior reality and individuality might emerge from the reassuring surface imagery of photography and war. By analysing photographs of Italian migrants who either joined Italy’s army or enrolled in their adopted country’s army, we can see how the ‘otherness’ of the war – its artificial face of idealised glory, honour, and ordinariness, as presented through the portrait’s aesthetic codes – supplants the ‘otherness’ of the migrant individual, that is, their ambivalent life in between different cultures, traditions and identities. Yet, beyond the physical and psychological annihilation of the modern war, the photographic portrait, with its fabricated order and ‘otherness’, becomes, for the migrant soldier, a means of giving coherence to his dislocated existence. The nostalgic visual codes of the photograph, however, evoke an order that is now denied by the destructive mobility and mobilisation of both migration and war.

Italian summary

L’articolo discute le tensioni che emergono dal codice visivo, e la misura in cui la realtà interiore del soggetto e la sua individualità appaiono in ritratti fotografici di italiani migranti arruolati nell’esercito italiano, o nelle truppe del paese d’adozione, durante la Grande Guerra. L’alterità dell’evento bellico, ossia la gloria, l’onore e la normalità idealizzati ed esibiti attraverso codici estetici sembrano soppiantare l’alterità del migrante, la sua ambivalenza derivante da una esistenza vissuta tra diverse culture, tradizioni ed identità. Al di là dell’annientamento fisico e psicologico della guerra, la fotografia, inoltre, diventa per il soldato migrante, un mezzo per restituire coerenza alla sua molteplice dislocazione esistenziale. L’ordine e la normalità evocati dal tradizionale e canonizzato codice visivo del ritratto fotografico, tuttavia, vengono contraddetti dalla distruttività propria della mobilità e della mobilitazione sia del processo migratorio che del moderno evento bellico.

Keywords

First World WarphotographyItalian soldiersmigrantsotherness
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 291 - 314
Copyright
© 2017 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

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